Without Pants But Wearing a Hat

‘This isn’t how a poor person looks.’

Earlier this year, when I lost a job and was in denial of my new financial situation, still spending $400 every week drinking at the Russian karaoke and buying expensive gifts for Masha, our Italian roommate said, “Serge behaves as if he still has a job. It’s fascinating!”

When my father was twenty-seven, he said to the seven-year-old me, “One day, we will celebrate my birthday by sailing around the world on a yacht.”

I nodded, unsure how to react to such statements except as the absolute, undeniable truth. When you’re a kid, everything your parents say, even if it sounds ludicrous in retrospect, seems like a fact of nature.

“And when you turn eighteen,” he continued, “we’ll buy you a car.”

We were walking by the installation of a Rolls-Royce in Moscow’s Pushkin Square. The year was 2004. The car rotated on a metal cube with a Rolls-Royce logo instead of license plates. I looked at that Rolls-Royce, and I might as well have been looking at a time machine. Driving a car, let alone owning one, seemed an impossible achievement, a part of some other life, which I’d probably get to live no sooner than in a few centuries.

Fifteen years after our walk, I dropped out of university and got a one-way ticket back to Moscow. I didn’t tell my parents.

The flight was on March 8th — International Women’s Day, a big thing in Russia, one of the two gender celebrations of early spring, a day when women receive flowers and quirky GIFs on WhatsApp. I arrived at my mother’s place with nothing but a knock on the door and a bouquet of tulips I got at the local metro station.

“Oh my God!” she screamed when she saw me.

“Happy Women’s Day!” I said. Then, quoting my grandfather, “I congratulate you on being a woman.”

She had questions — what, when, how, and why I dropped out — though, answering them, I got the feeling she was just happy to see me by her side and didn’t care whether I studied or not. That’s the beautiful thing about our mother: to this day, all she cares about is that her children are alive and fed.

My father, though, wasn’t as happy after hearing the news of my decision. You’re on your own now, he emailed me on the day of my flight. The child of two PhDs, he couldn’t comprehend that his only son would be left without a formal education.

But two days later, he gave in and offered me a job at his company. Sometimes I wonder why he had a…